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Elf Power has recently been walking a line of subtlety that
appears banal compared to their early sonic experiments.
About four years ago, the band was working on A Dream in
Sound, their most openly experimental and diverse record
to date. Moods ranged from carnivalesque to sincere and a
wash of horns, keyboards, and samples often blurred the line
between the two. Lyrically, the album showed a cohesiveness
that went beyond “concept album” and into some notion of “art”
or “poetry.” It would not be fair to say that Elf Power has
gone down hill from that point, but their two newer albums
have required more effort on the part of listeners to realize
how well crafted the music continues to be.
Creatures, released this May, like The Winter is
Coming before it, does not suffer from a lack of accessibility.
Elf Power has always been accessible, just as most bands from
Athens have (at least amongst the Elephant 6). The key to
the success of these bands has always been mixing a straightforward
rock/folk/psychedelic sound with a current of complex instrumentation
and lyricism underneath. With Elf Power’s last two albums,
the superficial straightforwardness has remained while the
complexity underneath has not been as obvious. A Dream
in Sound deliberately creates rough edges to draw attention
to its complexity. The range of instruments, lyrics, and
experimental noise signal that something else is going on.
On Creatures, the final product is so smooth that the
listener might not think to look for anything complex or experimental.
Elf Power creates this smoothness by combining familiar elements
with better production. The lyrics again explore Andrew
Rieger’s fascination with the mystical aspects of nature
(although reducing the lyrics in this way misses Rieger’s
stronger metaphysical points), the chord progressions and
melodies seem as simple as ever, almost to the point of seeming
a little too familiar, and the mastering provides a crispness
suggesting Elf Power’s farewell to their lo-fi roots. If
these elements do not turn you off the record, you might just
listen to it enough times to realize that Elf Power utilizes
all of these aspects to create a “creature” of an album shuddering
with a life and beauty so pristine and elegant that no other
chord progressions or production would have suited it. This
has consistently been Elf Power’s threat and promise – the
most innocent and straightforward, almost “cute” Elephant
6 band that somehow manages to continually create and
examine worlds strikingly wonderful and devastating in their
implications for our “real” world. If you have ever discarded
an Elf Power album as too fantastically trite or simple, you
have missed its deepest attack on everything you consider
stable and meaningful. Although it took me several listens
to realize this, Creatures proves no exception.
One figure that Rieger uses throughout the lyrics explains
and strengthens the move towards simplicity on Creatures.
This figure involves the use of locality and the metaphorical
opposition between “underground”/”underneath” and “over”/”above.”
Rieger’s repeated references to creatures lurking beneath
us take on an element of absurdity. These claims are repeated
so often that “underneath” begins to resonate with all of
its paranoid and hierarchical implications. The serpent’s
underground (as are the spirits that pull from underneath
and the creature waiting right beneath your feet),
and this suggests two unique but perversely connected reactions.
The first is paranoia: what the hell is this creature doing
underneath? Is it hiding under the bed, right down there
with the aliens and the government plots? The second is superiority:
these creatures, like all of the creatures that Rieger has
employed to make a case for the validity of the worlds of
dreams and fantasies, are only objects of the imagination,
cute at best, repulsive at worst, and they have nothing to
do with the rational autonomous projects of myself and the
rest of Western civilization. The link between paranoia and
superiority is a link of difference and subsequently threat:
these creatures are foreign to me, and therefore they disrupt
my security and rationality. The only purpose they serve
comes in my ability to oppose myself to them – the creatures,
in all of their silliness, grossness, and perverse imaginativeness,
are everything that I am not.
In several of the songs, this attitude is under attack.
The opening track “Let the Serpent Sleep” provides a very
straightforward plea hinged on the fact that nature contains
many “facts” that we have no reason to judge in any way as
being “wrong” or “evil.” The day turns into night / The
dog will always bite, and the serpent was never a literal
embodiment of evil. We made the serpent out to be this way
in order to establish a notion of not evil, of good, of moral
correctness. We were able to do this to the serpent because
We’re frozen underneath, unresponsive to nature’s simplicity
of being. “The Creature” offers a prophecy that reveals the
frailty of our systems that define good and evil, human and
inhuman, rational and creative, and generally cover nature
with an artificial web of meaning: Come on under / I’ll
be waiting / right beneath your feet / Time is over / we’re
forgotten / lightning fills the seas. This last line
not only offers a beautiful image of raw nature, it also suggests
the primordial soup and the electric genesis of life. Further
lyrics go on to describe the appeal of raw nature, the limits
of the modern mind that cannot comprehend this nature on its
own terms, and the possibilities for intertwining our understandings
of these two phenomena.
The real catch comes when you realize that Elf Power has
used the under/above, inside/outside motif in order to deconstruct
it. Rather than being underneath or outside of us, creatures
are actually part of what makes us human. We all share in
the grotesque, the absurd, the hideous, the silly, the fantastic,
and if we would allow our imaginations to do more with this
than our rationality, we might be able to do something with
these characteristics other than suppress them. The refreshing
and troubling power of Elf Power’s music has always been to
show not a world of fantasy lying somewhere at the edge of
our perception or the limits of our imagination, but a world
that we are constantly participating in and choosing to ignore.
With this realization, Elf Power’s choice of style and production
take on significant rhetorical strength. If they had used
sampled noise and a variety of non-traditional instruments
on Creatures, Elf Power would be perpetuating the division
of inside/outside. By using familiar chord progressions and
melodies, the music appeals to something that resonates deeper
inside of us. Rather than making distinctions between something
like guitar and horn or electronic sample and live acoustic,
on this album the band relies on the notion of degree and
tone. A song like “The Creature” achieves a sense of dynamics
not from a variety of instruments but rather a subtle development
of tone amongst the several guitars on the track. Several
songs utilize multiple guitar or violin tracks to weave around
a melody, a technique which creates a feeling of multiple
branches stemming from the same trunk, or, if you agree with
my general analysis of the lyrics, multiple creatures roaming
the same body or self. The result is stirring and elegant,
a texture that resonates in the simple devices of folk rock
as well as the attempts of artists throughout time to prove
that there is more in heaven and earth that is dreamt of in
our philosophy.
Even if you refuse to allow a rock record (and a short one
at that, clocking in around 35 minutes) to challenge your
very method of defining yourself, to give you access to worlds
lying so simply around you and inside of you that it would
take years before you found them without Elf Power’s help,
Creatures still possesses a charisma, intensity, and
beauty that the most casual of listeners should enjoy.
— Matt King
Track List:
- Let the Serpent Sleep
- Everlasting Scream
- The Creature
- Palace of the Flames
- The Modern Mind
- Visions of the Sea
- Things That Should Not Be
- Three Seeds
- The Haze
- Unseen Hand
- The Creature Part II
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